Postcolonialism - Critical Purpose

Critical Purpose

The critical purpose of Post-colonial Studies is to account for and to combat the residual effects (social, political, and cultural) of colonialism upon the cultures of the peoples who had been ruled and exploited by the Mother Country. As such, post-colonial theoreticians establish social and cultural spaces in their respective academic fields of enquiry for the voices of the peoples of the world — especially the voices of the Subaltern peoples who had been silenced by the dominant ideology (value systems) of the colonial powers; in the European Western world, Academia is the principal and initial place where such socio-cultural spaces are established. In the book Orientalism (1978), Edward Saïd lucidly described how European scholars — who studied what The West called “The Orient” (usually the Middle East and Asia) — disregarded the intellectual and cultural perspectives of the Asian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim peoples proper, whom the Europeans studied, and, in their stead, substituted their preferred, European interpretations and representations of what is and what is not, and of who is and who is not “Oriental”, to support their self-ascribed intellectual and cultural superiority, which then allowed the European West to name, describe, and define, and thereby control, non-European peoples, places, and things; an attitude of absolute cultural superiority forged and facilitated by colonial imperialism.

Philosophically, post-colonial theory establishes the critical discourses that destabilize the ideologically dominant discourses of the European West, by intellectually challenging the “inherent assumptions . . . material and discursive legacies of colonialism”. In order to challenge the cultural, intellectual, and philosophic assumptions and legacies of colonialism, post-colonial studies are based upon working with tangible socio-cultural identities, connections, and processes, such as cultural identity in a colonized society; the dilemmas inherent to developing a national identity after de-colonization; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity, often reclaimed from the colonizer, whilst maintaining connections with the colonial Mother Country; the ways in which knowledge of the colonized people was generated and used to solely serve the interests of the colonial power; and the ways in which the literature of the colonial power justified colonialism with cultural representations (literary and pictorial) of the colonized country as a perpetually inferior people, society, and culture. In the event, post-colonialism permits the subaltern peoples reply to the colonial legacy of the Mother Country by writing back to the center, whereby, using the colonial language, the indigenous peoples write their own national histories, and create cultural legacies, for their own national purposes. In post-colonial praxis, Indigenous decolonization is the intellectual impact of post-colonialist theory upon indigenous peoples, usually manifest in their post-colonial literature.